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In Sunday’s season finale of “I Love L.A.,” Los Angeles is blamed for getting between the show’s protagonist, Maia (Rachel Sennott), and her live-in boyfriend, Dylan (Josh Hutcherson). After their relationship falls apart, Maia, an aspiring talent manager, absconds to New York with her only client, Tallulah (Odessa A’zion), a party girl turned influencer, so that the pair can attend a fashion dinner that will increase Tallulah’s profile. Maia and Dylan go on a break, which gives her the leeway to pursue an opening at a big-league agency by hooking up with an old boss. These would seem to be irreconcilable differences, but her most emotionally astute friend, Charlie (Jordan Firstman), still tries to play couples therapist, reassuring Dylan that their environs are to blame. “This town,” he says, has turned Maia “bad and hard.”

“I Love L.A.,” which was created by Sennott, has a transplant’s grasp of its titular city. (Sennott herself moved to Los Angeles during the pandemic.) The setting is far from the only element that feels underdeveloped: the inner lives of the characters, nearly all of whom spend their waking hours at jobs dedicated to image curation, are more suggested than seen. The new series, on HBO, pales in comparison with predecessors like “Sex and the City” and “Girls,” which also chronicled the urban misadventures of privileged, self-absorbed women (and gay men). But “I Love L.A.” is undeniably fascinating as a portrait of zillennial brain rot—a product, in this case, of their participation in the creator and attention economies. In her first scene with Charlie and another friend, Alani (True Whitaker), Maia shit-talks Tallulah—at that point, still a frenemy—for continuing to post modelling photos from a months-old campaign, and debates whether to continue muting her or to block her entirely. Just as addled is Charlie, a celebrity stylist who wears T-shirts quoting viral TikToks. Both are blasé about their phone addictions, scrolling while getting dressed or immediately after sex. To paraphrase the “Sex and the City” truism, the fifth character isn’t Los Angeles but the internet.

The vagaries of life online inform the show’s structure, and contribute to its seeming lack of stakes. The ensemble navigates novel problems with remarkable creativity; the problems themselves are utterly inane. In the third episode—the season’s first strong outing—a rival influencer named Paulena posts a video airing Tallulah’s dirty laundry, throwing Maia into crisis mode. (Tallulah is accused of being a “criminal” and, even worse, a “kink shamer.”) Maia’s millennial boss, Alyssa (Leighton Meester), hands her a road map out of the scandal involving a stilted, corporate-approved apology. Maia, sensing that Tallulah’s followers will be put off by the inauthenticity, advises her to take a more 2025 approach, attacking Paulena as a phony with ill-gotten generational wealth. The mob turns on Paulena, and the viral disaster subsides; as Alani says of the internet, “It’s dangerous but fair, like the ocean.”

The notion that all things must pass is both a comfort and a threat. Sennott and Firstman were both internet comedians before they made the leap to TV, and their fluency in this world helps to sharpen the satire. An encounter with a more established influencer—the real-life TikToker Quen Blackwell, playing a version of herself, as she has since she posted her first Vine, at age fourteen—drives home the perils of staking your livelihood on such unstable terrain. After submitting to a soulless, data-driven collab, Tallulah stumbles upon Quen’s “click farm,” a wall of a hundred-odd smartphones playing videos on a loop, to juice engagement. Bathed in the blue glow of the screens, Quen tells her, with perfect certainty, “If you stop for a second, you will fucking disappear.”

“I Love L.A.” ’s treatment of this anxiety is funny and, as the season progresses, sneakily humanizing. The series is about figuring out how to be an adult: Maia, who turns twenty-seven in the first episode, has to find something approaching work-life balance, while the self-protectively cynical Charlie gradually accepts that sincerity is O.K., even if you’re a city gay. But, in a new-media economy, milestones are less defined and harder to come by than they were in the days of “S.A.T.C.” Carrie Bradshaw’s observations and puns may have been cringeworthy, but we as viewers didn’t have to wonder how she might find satisfaction in her work as a writer. A generation later, Hannah Horvath scrabbled for purchase in the same much-diminished industry, making two hundred dollars per confessional blog post about, say, her first time trying cocaine. The career paths on offer in “I Love L.A.” are iffier still. Alyssa, for all her talk about supporting her fellow-women, has no intention of promoting Maia, and even actively undercuts her. Maia initially sells Tallulah on a three-year plan to refashion her into a wellness personality, but neither are particularly keen on sponsorships with so-called blue-chip brands like Ritz crackers. When they finally do make Tallulah a model for Ritz, in exchange for a hundred-thousand-dollar paycheck, the mural the brand splashes on an L.A. street corner is so embarrassing that she herself destroys it. But it’s not clear how much further an “it girl” best known for stealing a Balenciaga bag can get.

Sennott and her writers keep things from turning too dark, though they don’t shy away from bleak material: at one point, they mine comedy from a minor figure’s funeral. One of the show’s best recurring gags is a character describing an experience without grasping just how alarming it is. Alani, a Hollywood nepo baby who compares her upbringing to that of Stacey Dash’s Dionne in “Clueless,” recounts her first date to a group of employees at her dad’s production company who are eager to remake the movie. They’re impressed that the guy took her to an omakase place when she was in the eighth grade, until she blithely reveals that he was twenty-eight and had a newborn at home. “I Love L.A.” as a whole pulls a similar trick, immersing its characters so thoroughly in their own universe that they can’t see their circumstances clearly. Maia’s escape to New York in the season finale is an obligatory return, but it’s also a depressing attempt to outrun the vacuity of her career, as if more prestigious brand deals might give her a greater sense of meaning. It feels fitting that we see all this through Sennott’s sleepy lids, which convey the two predominant reactions to the internet today: she’s at once bewildered and already over it. ♦

In October, thieves broke into the Louvre and purloined a priceless collection of jewelry—including a pearl tiara, set with thousands of diamonds, that had belonged to Empress Eugénie. The incident was memed around the world, even by the German company that manufactured the burglars’ ladder; in France, a country where cultural heritage is practically a state religion, it was treated like a terrorist attack. Not a few observers also saw a teachable moment: Didn’t the Louvre hold thousands of treasures stolen from other peoples, who must have felt much as the French do now? The museum’s founding director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, travelled across Europe with Napoleon’s armies, confiscating Raphaels and Veroneses in the name of “freedom.” More than a century of plunder followed. Empress Eugénie herself got in on the action. In 1860, when a Franco-British army sacked the Qing emperor’s Summer Palace—a wound so fresh in China that Jackie Chan starred in a 2009 film about it—she accepted a share of the booty.

Nine such displacements are chronicled in a bracing new book written by the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, in collaboration with Jeanne Pham Tran, and newly translated into English by Andrew Brown: “Who Owns Beauty?” Savoy would know. For years, she’s been not only asking but concretely answering that question, first as a scholar of museums, and then as an architect of the ongoing global shift toward restitution. In 2018, Emmanuel Macron asked Savoy and Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese intellectual, to advise on France’s repatriation of art works to its former colonies in Africa. The resulting Sarr-Savoy report led not only to the homecoming of sculptures from the Dahomey kingdom—immortalized in a fantastical documentary by Mati Diop—but to a wave of returns from other European countries, particularly of the Benin Bronzes, whose saga will soon anchor a romantic thriller by Ava DuVernay.

Now Savoy has emerged as one of the art world’s leading thinkers. “Who Owns Beauty?” netted her the prestigious European Essay Prize, whose laureates include Giorgio Agamben and Arundhati Roy. In September, just weeks before the heist, she was appointed the Chaire du Louvre, a yearlong role that culminates in a series of lectures. It’s a chance to bring her critique of the “universal” museum to its birthplace: “Who Owns Beauty?” began as a course entitled “The Global History of the Louvre.” Earlier this month, Savoy spoke to me via Zoom from her home in Berlin, where she heads the Technical University’s department of art history. We discussed Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian, Hitler’s infatuation with Nefertiti, and the prospects for restitution amid the breakdown of the liberal international order. Our conversation, which took place in French, has been translated and condensed.

I hope you’ll forgive me for starting with the recent heist. How did you react when you heard?

I was surprised! I knew, but not to what extent, the “crown jewels”—which is to say, things belonging to the king, to the kingdom, everything that the French Republic abolished—were at the Louvre. The following Monday, I was teaching a course on the transnational history of European museums, and we spoke about it immediately. For the students, especially the Gen Z ones, the question was: Where did these turquoises, these jades, these precious stones come from? And how can we learn more?

I went to look a bit on the Louvre’s website to see the provenance and discovered the recency of the acquisitions. The absence of information about the material was interesting, like always. When you look into the biography of objects, there are always gaps.

Where were they before?

In family collections, some in Germany—it’s very surprising. If you look at the Louvre’s online catalogue, you’ll see that they were acquired in the eighties. Certain political parties have exploited the whole incident as a grave wound to French identity. But when you see that they’re products of the recent art market, it’s a whole different thing.

It’s clear that there was a lot of shock in France.

There were a hundred responses, a polyphony. There was, first of all, a massive political instrumentalization, which is to say, political parties accusing their government of poorly protecting France’s sacred royalist patrimony. Others attached to a republican idea of the museum were sad that public money wasn’t used to better protect the establishment. I think not a few people also felt Schadenfreude—all those jokes on Instagram about the password [for the museum’s security system] being “Louvre” and all. If we can take anything away from all these different, and sometimes dissonant, voices, it’s the fact that when a museum is attacked, it touches everyone.

In any case, the museum staff were the most shocked. It’s a true trauma. I’m in close contact with people at all levels, and everyone, in their way, is shocked, practically as though—and I exaggerate, it’s not a good comparison—but almost as though after a rape.

The main takeaway, for me, is that museums have a vulnerability—a technical, physical vulnerability—that is mirrored by the vulnerability of the public’s reaction, the idea that you can be culturally wounded in a profound collective manner.

It’s quite a coincidence that the Louvre was burgled just after appointing an expert on stolen art. Were you surprised by your appointment, given your calls for the return of stolen works?

It’s a surprise, but also a homecoming. As a researcher, I was born at the Louvre. At the end of the nineties, I contributed to an exhibition about its first director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, which, for the first time in the museum’s history, disclosed the whole story about the Napoleonic looting of art. In a way, it was the Louvre that got me started. But returning after so much time, and after reflecting on the subject in an African context, has totally changed my perspective.

What I want to emphasize is that this institution is courageous enough to allow critical voices into its very heart. Maybe you remember that after Felwine Sarr and I published our report, a museum director called it “a cry of hate” against museums. But it wasn’t hate. If you love museums, you have to be critical of them—so that they stay relevant, in tune with young people, with the questions that concern us today.

I’m glad you brought up Denon. Can you say a bit about how your work on art plunder in the many wars between France and Germany shaped your thinking?

The decisive factor was moving to Berlin. I was studying the way that France emptied out German collections, and, because of where I was living, I adopted the point of view of the victims. Of course, I was still interested in the Parisian side, in the reception of German works there, et cetera. But primarily, I was struck by what it does to a society to be culturally dispossessed. Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, the Humboldt brothers—the whole intelligentsia of the time talked about the subject so, so much. There was very sophisticated writing on the violation of German museums, the experience of loss and absence, all of that, even in poems by Schiller—all the German Romantics, the greatest writers of the epoch, even painters and draughtsmen, all commented. I was young, twenty-three or twenty-four, and that’s why it was so natural to write, later on, with Felwine, about the African context. Because when you’re sensitized very young to the expression of loss, you hear them, whether they were in the Germany of 1800 or the Cameroon of 1900.

It’s really striking to read about Denon accompanying Napoleon’s armies, saying, “We should take this altarpiece and this Raphael.” The Louvre is often considered to be the first “universal” or “encyclopedic” museum. Is that idea bound up from the beginning in conquest?

Absolutely. “Universalism,” which is so much debated these days, was articulated as a concept during the French Revolution, then espoused by Napoleon. But it was already typical rhetoric by the years 1794-95. It’s a totalitarian ideology: We’re going to take everything from everywhere, “horizontally,” and give it to subsequent generations, “vertically,” and this project concerns all peoples—which is to say, everyone must agree with us. It’s a triple totalitarianism, if you will. And that’s where the Louvre and the Bibliothèque National Français originated. In Paris, it was possible to see this as a noble project—today, we would say an “open access” project—securing everyone’s heritage for posterity. Except that books and works of art can only exist in one place. The theoreticians spoke of Paris becoming the “school of the universe,” and exercising dominion over teaching and knowledge. Basically, everything will come to Paris, and, henceforth, the others will have to orient themselves in its direction. It’s incredibly violent if you think of it from the perspective of Florence, Rome, Bologna, Brussels, Berlin.

So, from the outset, “universalism” is belied by a particularism of this city, this empire, this museum at the heart of everything. And yet, you write that a lot of these were justified in terms of democratizing works that were owned by the aristocracy and the Church, no?

Yes. It began inside France’s borders, with the nationalization of the property of the king, the clergy, the aristocracy. But after taking these there were still gaps in the “encyclopedism” of the museums and libraries, and they began to speak of looking elsewhere to fill them. The rhetoric was “Art and literature are a product of liberty, and they must be brought to the land of liberty”—liberty, fraternity, and plunder, if you will. It’s very perverse. When a country decides to centralize its heritage, it may be violent for particular regions. But when you export this policy, you are creating an aggression that becomes foundational to the idea of heritage. And for those dispossessed this aggression weighed more than the idea of “liberating” the arts.

You’re, of course, an advocate for restitution. But even as you describe the violence of this centralization, there are so many examples of how these art works sparked creativity in new contexts. You describe the bust of Nefertiti inspiring the Weimar avant-garde, or even how Napoleon’s gathering of Raphaels at the Louvre led to the first serious academic monograph on an artist. How do you balance the interests of what some call communities of origin and those who become attached to works that, in some cases, have been in their cities for decades or centuries?

It’s the hardest thing. In the public debate, there are those who speak only about such cultural cross-fertilization, and those who speak only about restitution. Putting them together seems contradictory—and maybe it is, if you look at a single moment in time. But there is a longer time frame.

The bust of Nefertiti was under the sand for three thousand years. In 1912, they dug it out of the sand and sent it to Berlin, which was then the capital of drugs, tango, homosexuality. But today, more than a hundred years later, we can say that the bust of Nefertiti has already had its effect in Berlin. Now the halls are empty. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if it could have an impact elsewhere? And why not where it came from?

I had the truly great privilege of travelling to the Tell el-Amarna, where Nefertiti was dug up, and today you see that there are children, women, families of people who live under the same sun as Nefertiti, with the Nile right there—modern people, wearing Nikes, et cetera, but living in the same environment. And why not? What might happen if we returned Nefertiti there? What could that do for the feminist movement in Egypt, where so many young women identify with Nefertiti as liberated women? There’s Nefertiti graffiti everywhere, an enormous replica of the bust at the entrance of town.

It’s very improbable that a twenty-year-old in today’s Amarna—who might be, say, an Uber driver—would be able to get a visa, or even enough money, to see the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin. Many generations have had no chance to be impacted by it.

They don’t have the chance, for instance, that Hitler had to see Nefertiti. I was fascinated to learn that he blocked a potential restitution in 1933.

Before the First World War, Egypt wasn’t autonomous. France controlled everything underground, through the antiquities service, and the U.K. controlled everything aboveground. So, the Germans arrive, they make their excavations at Amarna, they discover Nefertiti, and the French say, “O.K., you can take it to Berlin.” This was just before the First World War, [and it was] a very long time before the French and Germans in Cairo would speak again. When, finally, the Germans asked if they could resume their excavations, the French—who still controlled the antiquities service—said no, because they had “stolen” Nefertiti.

Egypt became independent, and they almost reached an agreement with the Germans. A date was even set. Then, along comes Hitler, who supposedly falls in love with Nefertiti and blocks this return. Then came the Second World War, and the Cold War, and the partition. Nefertiti was taken by the Americans—the whole story is like a spy thriller. And it’s much more the history of the twentieth century than the history of Akhenaten, his wife, and his children. These works of art are always the product of the centuries that found them and displaced them.

Your last book, “Africa’s Struggle for Its Art,” was a lot more polemical than this one. Here, you’re also looking at Watteau’s “L’Enseigne de Gersaint” [which was legally purchased by Frederick the Great, but later demanded by French patriots] and the Mystic Lamb altarpiece, which have more tangled histories. For you, is restitution always case specific? Or are there general principles?

I have a very clear opinion on works taken from the African continent during the colonial period: There’s nothing to discuss. If there is a claim, they must be returned. Maybe you saw “Dakar-Djibouti: Counter Investigations”? [The exhibition, which ran earlier this year at the Quai Branly, concerned the 1931-33 Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic and Linguistic Mission, when a team of ethnographers acquired art works from across Africa.]

No, but I wanted to.

The exhibition was organized around the time of my report with Felwine, because we had said that even “scientific expeditions” [to acquire works] were shady. At the time, the Quai Branly wasn’t very happy. They said, “Ah, we’re going to conduct a counter-investigation. You’ll see that we bought all these for a few francs.” But the central issue is consent. Before, at the Quai Branly, you could never say that something had been “stolen.” Now they say “theft,” “extortion,” et cetera, and acknowledge that the Dakar-Dibouti exhibition was largely blackmail—that people were pressured, forced to sell.

You write that, in Cameroon, ethnologists were directing German soldiers to sack certain villages so they could fill gaps in their collections.

It’s crazy. They were telling them, “Before burning this or that town, take photos,” or “before burning it, send us the pillars or the paving stones.” In Berlin, there are cobblestones from a palace that was later burned. At the Humboldt Forum, our ethnographic museum here in Berlin, when you go into the Cameroonian galleries, you feel like you’re in a museum of burned villages. The art works do little more than tell us that they were picked up from the ashes.

Your book also touches on less clear-cut cases—like the Pergamon Altar, which was exported to Germany from the Ottoman Empire then reconstructed at what’s now the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. How do we deal with cases where art was legally exported, but under the auspices of a government that didn’t necessarily have the consent of the locals, or fully realize what it had?

I went to Turkey, to Pergamon, to see what its absence is like, and it’s shocking. In the long term, I would bring it back. These transactions were able to take place in the eighteen-hundreds despite local resistance. But today, the presence of the Pergamon Altar in Berlin is completely absurd. Originally, it had four sides, and was perched on Pergamon’s acropolis. It had one side where the sun rises and another side where the sun sets. The frescoes, the sculptures—everything moved with the sun, with the light, with the shadows and everything. It’s a work of art meant to be seen within the landscape, from below, when you’re in the city and look up. Over there, it’s incredibly missed. Here, not only is it displayed the wrong way around, but it’s not a cube. It’s under a roof. And, what’s more, it’s been closed to the public since 2014. [It’s expected to reopen in 2027.]

There’s a huge Turkish community here in Berlin. To me, it’s a scandal, or a missed opportunity, not to remind everyone in this city that it comes from present-day Turkey. The museum tells you it comes from the Pergamon of antiquity, and they don’t mention that this place still exists, there are still people there, an acropolis, et cetera. If we took this seriously, we could very well say, “O.K., we’ll take all the Turkish children in Berlin to Pergamon for their tenth birthdays”—or not just Turkish children but all children! “We’ll take a hundred or a hundred and fifty of them to Pergamon, we’ll show them where it should be, and then we’ll bring a hundred or two hundred children from Pergamon to Berlin.” If governments aren’t ready to make returns, at least we could do something that would allow us to talk to each other.

One long-standing complaint of the restitution movement is that Western museums don’t even exhibit most of what they have from the non-Western world—or, if they do, it’s decontextualized. And yet many of the world’s encyclopedic museums have been working to correct that perception. For instance, I reviewed the Met’s renovated Rockefeller Wing, and when they reinstalled their famous Kwoma ceremonial-house ceiling, from Papua New Guinea, they consulted with descendants of the artists who created it. And they’ve made a point of exhibiting more than they did previously. You could say the same of the V. & A.’s new East Storehouse.

There’s also the Gallery of Five Continents that just reopened at the Louvre. It was that room that no one ever went to, where there are African works, Oceanic works, and so on. My feeling is that it’s good that museums feel compelled to speak to what they call communities of origin. In any case, the young public—I’m getting older, but my students always stay twenty—can’t go to a museum without that dialogue. Otherwise, it makes them too uncomfortable; they feel the epistemological violence very strongly.

When I went to New York to see the new Rockefeller Wing, we were greeted by two large Cameroonian statues. I saw that if you scan the QR code with your phone, you can see some information about their provenance. You can see that, say, it was bought by some wealthy person in the nineteen-sixties, but you’d like to know what happened beforehand.

I’m in many WhatsApp groups with African colleagues, including from Cameroon, and it still makes them very uncomfortable. In the Gallery of Five Continents, there’s a sculpture of the deity Gou that Benin has been clamoring for. Now it’s in the Louvre, and the Beninese—at least, those I work with—are not happy. Just because the work is better presented, the vitrines are beautiful, and they pretend to have talked to people doesn’t resolve the issue.

I’m glad you brought up the sculpture of Gou, because, of course, you called for its return in the Sarr-Savoy report, and yet, it’s still at the Louvre. Why do you think the political will around this issue has waned, in France and across Europe?

In France, there are a whole host of reasons why things have come to a standstill. There’s a law stipulating the inalienability of national collections, and changing this code requires an act of the National Assembly. We’ve seen laws passed authorizing the restitution of human remains, and of property seized from Jewish families during the Holocaust. But for art works taken during the colonial period that ended up in French museums, the law has not yet been passed; it’s been in the pipeline for two years, because the National Assembly was dissolved. Plus, there are very strong internal tensions between Macron and the ministries and museums about who can make decisions. This slows things down.

In Germany, things went better for longer. But pretty much everywhere in Europe, after October 7th, “post-colonial” discussions slowed down considerably. Because of Germany’s historical responsibility for the Holocaust, and their unconditional solidarity with Israel, as soon as you mention colonialism—since some consider what’s happening in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza to be colonialism—you are quickly labelled antisemitic. Despite the energy and money that previous governments had invested in addressing German colonization, everyone got a bit afraid: if we talk too much about colonialism, it’s dangerous. My impression, having been in São Paulo, Brazil, for a BRICS conference on restitution, is that new developments might now come less from Europe and more from outside of it.

How do you think the global right-wing shift will affect the politics of restitution?

It remains to be seen. In the United States, the shift is very pronounced. The Smithsonian Institution had begun restitution efforts with Nigeria. Now the museum is being intimidated. I imagine that institutions like that will try to remain discreet while waiting for a more favorable political climate. Fortunately, the European countries whose governments have shifted to the right or far right—like Italy—are ones that have themselves lost [cultural heritage].

I’m sure you’ve been following the contestation in Nigeria over who should control the returned Benin Bronzes. First, the government went back and forth over if they should be in state museums or with the Oba of Benin, who wants to build his own private museum and is a descendant of the ruler from whom they were taken. Then, just last month, the Oba’s supporters protested the opening of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), which was also seen as a potential home for them. Do you think this could make Western governments and museums hesitate about future returns?

When the Humboldt Forum opened in Berlin, there were years of protests. [Savoy resigned from its advisory board in 2017.] So the fact that, in Benin City, there were protests against the opening of MOWAA, which was perceived as an imported museum, didn’t surprise me at all.

It’s precisely when you physically return things that discussions begin over who owns beauty, who owns heritage, where we’re going to put it, who’s going to take care of it, et cetera. As long as the Benin Bronzes were in Berlin, London, no one could have these debates. Yet they’re fundamental to societies. Here in Germany, they’ve been debating whether or not we should exhibit Soviet art from the G.D.R. era since the fall of the Berlin Wall. When Napoleon returned everything he had stolen from Germany, there was no public museum in Berlin. It took fifteen years of discussion before one opened.

In Mati Diop’s film, we see [Beninese] students arguing over whether they should be happy, whether they should be afraid, whether the art works should be somewhere else. That’s what cultural heritage is. Cultural heritage isn’t just a pen you put in your pocket. It’s all the discussions around it. Except that, without restitution, you can’t have these discussions. You can’t ask Nigerians to discuss their inheritance if all their inheritance is abroad. Restitution is the beginning of a story. It’s not the end, and it’s not washing our hands of the matter.

That’s a good response to skeptics like David Frum, who see these disagreements as an argument against restitution. For you, they’re essential.

They’re why we do this work.

Have you decided on the theme of your lectures as Chaire du Louvre?

I have free rein, and I’m going to continue doing what I’ve always done, which is to offer constructive criticism of institutions. It could be a history of criticism directed at the Louvre, from the Napoleonic era to the present day. But it’s not entirely decided.

What, if anything, can be salvaged from the idea of the “universal museum” for the museums of tomorrow?

I have serious reservations about this rhetorical construct. During the French Revolution, they didn’t speak of a universal museum; they spoke of “the most beautiful museum in the universe.” The idea of ​​a “universal museum” only really emerged in 2002, when there was considerable pressure for restitution, and the British Museum, the Berlin State Museums, and the Louvre [and many others, including the Met and the Prado] signed “The Declaration on the Value of Universal Museums.” It’s only about a page long and really unpleasant, because it ends by saying that universal museums are open to everyone. If you’re against universal museums, you’re a particularist. But they start from the premise that the universal museum is open to everyone, whereas the universal museum is only open to people who live in London, Paris, Berlin, or who have a visa and can come see it.

To what extent can all the crises that these museums in general, and the Louvre in particular, are going through be an opportunity for reinvention?

The Louvre was already somewhat reinventing itself under Laurence des Cars [the museum’s director, since 2021]. They’ve given more space to the contemporary, and invited artists, like my friend Kader Attia, a French artist of Algerian descent, to be in residence. So, the museum is opening up a bit. What I mainly hope is that these crises won’t cause it to close again.

I’ve just finished another book—in Spanish, for the Prado, which will be published in January—about the restitutions of 1815, when Napoleon was driven out, and it ends with the observation that when the Louvre was forced to return what it had taken, everyone said, “The Louvre is dead, the Louvre is dead!” Two years later, the Louvre fully reopened. It wasn’t dead at all, and we understand that the restitutions provided an opportunity for it to reorganize itself, to present things differently and in a less crowded fashion. In 1817, when it reopened, many people said, “Wow! You can breathe.” So these moments of crisis can indeed be moments of reinvention.

Unfortunately, today, the question of money is very central. The Louvre is a public museum, funded in large part by the government, and it’s the same in Germany. Since Europe is preparing for war, and therefore rearming, I don’t know if museums will be given the resources that they need. The situation with Ukraine is really right on our doorstep. National service is being reintroduced in France and Germany, and our students are demonstrating; these aren’t times when museums are the center of attention. Sometimes even I hesitate a little to give talks about museums. When I went to Kyiv three weeks ago . . . well, you go to Kyiv, you spend the night under the bombs, you come back, you don’t particularly want to say “we must return Nefertiti” and all that.

Your book is full of examples of how war and geopolitics shape translocations of heritage. Today, France has been expelled from many African countries, and China is emerging as possibly the world’s leading power. How will shifts like these alter the politics of restitution?

When Emmanuel Macron announced, in Ouagadougou, in 2017, that he was going to make restitution, he had an ulterior motive. There were protests against France in Burkina Faso, and he thought, or his advisers thought, that he could improve France’s image. So it was a geopolitical calculation, or even a “geopoetic” one, if you will. Well, it completely backfired. He returned two and a half tons of pieces that had been prominently displayed in France for a long time. These weren’t things taken out of storage; they were truly central to the Quai Branly Museum and its predecessors. But it didn’t improve France’s image at all. On the contrary, the situation worsened in Burkina Faso, in Niger, in Senegal, and in Mali. In Benin, things are still more or less O.K., but throughout West Africa, in Cameroon, France’s image is very bad. We always talk about art diplomacy, restitution diplomacy, and so on, but it seems to me that heritage resists being exploited.

My second answer is that the BRICs countries have considerable power. I’m sure that if India, which is currently nationalist and extremist, starts to demand everything that’s been in Great Britain since the colonial period, if China really makes a strong demand for the return of the Summer Palace property, it will be difficult to resist those demands. Restitutions usually happen under duress. The Nazis are defeated, Hitler kills himself, works slowly begin returning to Jewish families. What’s remarkable about the restitutions we’ve seen in recent years is that they were carried out peacefully. The people of Benin didn’t come to the Quai Branly Museum with Kalashnikovs to reclaim their artifacts.

If we don’t proceed gently now, a day will come when these powers will surely be weary, frustrated, or annoyed by this form of arrogance that has been possible for a century, particularly in Europe. The risk that restitution could turn violent doesn’t seem entirely abstract to me. It’s already in the collective imagination—the Jackie Chan film, for instance.

Do you see any future for yourself in shaping restitution policy, as you did with the Sarr-Savoy report?

If Emmanuel Macron or others were to ask me, I would do it. At the same time—I’ll show you, because I see it here on my desk—I did this work with colleagues from Cameroon that had a huge impact, even though it’s a purely academic work. [She holds up “Atlas of Absence,” a 2023 book that exhaustively documents the forty thousand Cameroonian works in German public collections.] After its release, Germany came together with delegates from Cameroon to discuss restitution.

Historical research is political, and I have enough political subjects that I don’t need to get involved with politicians. “Africa’s Struggle for Its Art” triggered the restitutions from Germany to Nigeria—because Germany had been saying, “We haven’t received any requests from Nigeria,” and I found documents showing they’ve had requests since 1972. The book comes out, and weeks later Germany says, “Oh, we’re going to return them.”

What does it mean that the world’s first universal museum is itself a looted art work of a kind—an appropriated Bourbon palace?

This is also true of the Humboldt Forum. It’s a copy of a Baroque castle, since the original Baroque castle was destroyed. Then, in the nineteen-seventies, the G.D.R. erected a Palace of the Republic, which was demolished in 2008. And then they rebuilt the Prussian kings’ castle, like a Disneyland. My students often joke, “Since the Humboldt Forum is already a copy, why not return the art works inside and replace them with copies?” That would be much more coherent.

France’s entire history is of reappropriating the heritage we haven’t destroyed. The Louvre was originally called the Central Museum of Arts [of the Republic], then the Napoleon Museum, then the Royal Museum, then the Imperial Museum, and so on. There’s a certain suppleness in accepting this kind of redefinition—of buildings, of collections, of war trophies that become a museum where cultures interact. We reinterpret a lot in museums. They’re machines for doing that.

You’ve said that when objects are taken, they invariably come back changed. Do you think that the crown jewels will be recovered? And, if so, will they be different?

I don’t know if they’ll be returned, but obviously they’d be different. The Louvre’s façade is already different. You see all of these tourists photographing a totally nondescript balcony [where the burglars entered], which has become the most interesting part of the museum, almost more so than the pyramid. So, if these crown jewels are recovered, they will probably attract more visitors than before. As ever, it’s the experience of loss that makes things interesting. ♦

Is reading dying? This year, as screens and social-media apps continued to fragment our attention, it felt like we finally began to grasp that there is a crisis at hand. In August, the journal iScience published a study by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London which analyzed how people across the United States—cumulatively nearly a quarter of a million, across twenty years—spent their time during a twenty-four-hour window. The data for 2023, the most recent year covered, showed that participants spent an average of sixteen minutes “reading for pleasure,” which included reading a magazine, book, or newspaper; listening to audiobooks; or reading on an electronic device. That figure, however, partially obscured a more striking finding: only sixteen per cent of the respondents read for pleasure at all during the day that was surveyed. In 2004, that figure was twenty-eight per cent. It is the trend line that is most alarming: in the past two decades, daily reading for pleasure has declined by about three per cent per year. It is a sustained, steady erosion, one that is unlikely to reverse itself anytime soon.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

Our information ecosystem is in the process of a similarly profound transformation. In 2025, The New Yorker celebrated its centenary. The question that has inevitably come up is whether the magazine can survive another hundred years. We’re now much more than a weekly print magazine, of course. We’re also a daily digital enterprise, active on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. This year brought a first: The New Yorker won a Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting. And a short film that we released won an Oscar—our second.

But I believe that The New Yorker will always be a word-driven enterprise, even decades from now, when the world might appear unrecognizable to a denizen of the year 2025. Here we celebrate words, and the way they can be arranged on the page—or screen—to surprise, delight, and inform; the way they can transport you; the way they can hold the powerful to account. Millions of people continue to read them. And we believe that this will be the case for many years to come.

It is in this spirit that we bring to you the most popular New Yorker stories of 2025, measured in the total time that people spent reading them. Consider this your personal year-end reading list, one that we hope provides hours of pleasure.

A Battle with My Blood

“When I was diagnosed with leukemia, my first thought was that this couldn’t be happening to me, to my family.”

Photograph by Thea Traff for The New Yorker

How Police Let One of America’s Most Prolific Predators Get Away

When a prosecutor began chasing an accused serial rapist, she lost her job but unravelled a scandal. Why were the police refusing to investigate Sean Williams?

The Chinese Adoptees Who Were Stolen

As thousands of Chinese families take DNA tests, the results are upending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins.

How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump

At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?

Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity.

Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t

Some psychiatric patients may actually have treatable autoimmune conditions. But what happens to the newly sane?

Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi

Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America

The reactionary blogger’s call for a monarch to rule the country once seemed like a joke. Now the right is ready to bend the knee.

The Best Books of 2025

Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2025 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry.

Patti LuPone Is Done with Broadway—and Almost Everything Else

The theatre diva, famed and feared for her salty bravado, dishes on Hal Prince, her non-friendship with Audra McDonald, and sexy but dumb New York Rangers.

We Might Have to “Shut Down the Country”

In an interview, Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, talks about what he thinks could happen if the Trump Administration defies the authority of the courts.

The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons

“The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died.”

What Did Men Do to Deserve This?

Changes in the economy and in the culture seem to have hit them hard. Scott Galloway believes they need an “aspirational vision of masculinity.”

Illustration by Max Guther

Can the Golden Age of Costco Last?

With its standout deals and generous employment practices, the warehouse chain became a feel-good American institution. In a fraught time, it can be hard to remain beloved.

Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound

Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits—how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives.

After Forty Years, Phish Isn’t Seeking Resolution

People who love Phish do so with a quasi-religious devotion. People who dislike Phish do so with an equal fervor.

Photographs by Peter Fisher for The New Yorker

The End of Children

Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

Why Biden’s White House Press Secretary Is Leaving the Democratic Party

Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.

The Leaning Tower of New York

How a luxury condo building in Manhattan went sideways.

“Wicked: For Good” Is Very, Very Bad

In the second of two movies adapted from the Broadway musical, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo battle fascism, bigotry, and some fairly dreadful filmmaking.

The Cocaine Kingpin Living Large in Dubai

Daniel Kinahan, an Irish drug dealer, commands a billion-dollar empire from the U.A.E. Why isn’t he in prison?

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

Photograph by Balarama Heller

Why I Broke Up with New York

“Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way.”

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

Power Houses: A Photo Portfolio

Inside the living rooms of notable New Yorkers.

Lorne Michaels Is the Real Star of “Saturday Night Live”

He’s ruled with absolute power for five decades, forever adding to his list of oracular pronouncements—about producing TV, making comedy, and living the good life.

The world beyond the ridgetop was a wall of gray cloud. One could look down to the left or the right at a forty-five-degree angle and see only gray. From the mist came loud moos and the clatter of cowbells. The American was too frightened to move.

She had felt cheerful on the sheltered concrete of the viewing platform, relaxed on the broad stairway with its sturdy bannister, and well enough on the roadlike path that looped behind the reassuring mass of the restaurant. The narrowing, roughening, and horizon-lowering that had turned that path into this trail had been gradual. Now its quality of teetering in space made her want to get on her knees and crawl.

The ground, composed of loose grit and softball-size rocks, was visibly wet. Her German friend Vroni was already twenty yards ahead.

Crouching to lower her center of gravity, Julia took three short steps and halted. She cocked her wrists to catch herself if she fell, and stood up half straight. Time to decelerate and deepen her breathing. “Slow down!” she called out.

Vroni turned on a dime and came back, bounding like a chamois. She stood before Julia, casually shifting her weight around, her beanie pushed back over her hazelnut hair, her questioning eyes an opaque brown. For all the exertion and the cold, her skin tone was even and yellowish, like a chain-smoker’s, although she wasn’t one. She rolled her own cigarettes to save money; this took time, and couldn’t be done non-stop, so the spots on her teeth did not entirely match her eyes.

The pink, patrician Julia, with her irreproachably healthy life style, swayed stiffly in an awkward squat, red-cheeked and trembling. She flattered herself that she liked to leap and romp, but that was only on even surfaces such as lawns and sandy beaches, where the appropriate animal comparison would be to a clumsy calf. For reasons of her own (osteopenia), she romped where it was safe to fall down. There being no courage without fear, she preferred activities that entailed neither. She routinely wore a helmet and gloves when riding a bicycle, and she had recently refused a ride in a glamorous classic car because it lacked shoulder belts and headrests. Just the other day, she had given her cowardice a workout on a Ferris wheel in Thun. When the gondola commenced to rise, she had slid to the floor and hugged its central pillar. By the third revolution, however, she was back on her seat, reassured that the bolt attaching her gondola to the wheel (there were countless bolts in the wheel to allow it to be dismantled for transport, but only the one above the gondola seemed to hold her life in its hands) was an inch and a half in diameter and smooth, without visible rust.

The ridge that she and Vroni were on now was literally the ground—a well-trodden promenade through a pasture, thick with footprints. She made a vain attempt to justify her poor attitude toward the perfect safety of (here she looked around, mentally checking her notes) the vertiginously inclined planes at whose apex she perched, flanked by a surging, abyssal void. “In the mountains one time with Wolfgang—” she began.

Immediately Vroni’s expression turned skeptical. She, of course, knew Wolfgang, a man from a verdant river valley among low hills, where elderly people took long strolls with their wheeled walkers and tiny children rode bicycles. “Wolfgang!” she scoffed.

Each could contextualize nearly anything the other said, because they had lived for many years in the same small town in Bavaria. They knew dozens, if not hundreds, of people in common; they knew each other’s professors, exes, friends, and favored bartenders. Vroni’s husband, a provincial snob and devoted reader of Casanova, had been known as such to Julia—and liable to flirt with her, despite his friendship with Wolfgang—long before Vroni came on the scene.

“I tried to get him to walk a trail like this,” Julia insisted, “and he was, like, No way! Because on a steep hill where it’s grass instead of rocks, when you trip, there’s nothing to break your fall. You just keep sliding all the way to the bottom!”

“That’s not true,” Vroni said. “A person who’s rolling is conical and top-heavy. I could fling myself down this mountain right now, and I’d just roll in a little circle and stop with my head pointing downhill. Want me to show you?” She stood at the edge of the trail, looking eagerly downward.

Julia said no, firmly.

But the claim was plausible enough, and Vroni’s faith in it seemed based in experience. The peak they were on, the Niesen, was famous for resembling a pyramid when viewed from Lake Thun, and Julia had assumed that if she slipped she would slide five thousand feet down its slick ramps, to be impaled by spiky larch branches. Accepting now that she would come to rest near the trail and be helped to her feet by Vroni, she stood up straight.

She rotated a hundred and eighty degrees on her axis to admire the restaurant behind her. A gust of wind rudely shoved a shred of cloud in front of it, so she turned back to Vroni. It was mid-July, eight o’clock in the morning, and the temperature on the summit was slightly above freezing. Mountains of jagged stone and permafrost lay to the south behind a vast shroud of droplets, obscuring the still rising sun.

The women were ill-prepared for the cold—Julia because she hadn’t expected it, and Vroni because she’d known it wouldn’t last. Thus Julia was conspicuous in a brand-new, radiantly cerulean zippered hoodie bearing the mountain’s logo, a bargain in the gift shop at thirty francs, about half what she would have imagined paying for a sweatshirt in Switzerland. Vroni wore a flimsy cotton cardigan over a silk shirt of indeterminate color. It might have been off-white once, or a dim yellow, stained by washing in rusty water. The rotting silk gaped open at the seams. Julia assumed that Vroni had found it in the trash after a flea market. Her little backpack had been inherited from her children—brand-name hiking gear adorably miniaturized, with many zippers—because the German government helped her pay for school supplies. There was nothing in it now but smoking equipment and a canteen.

It occurred to Julia that she had a small blanket with her. It was a castoff from her parents, decades old, a membership premium from the American Legion in navy-blue fleece with the embroidered slogan “Freedom Is Not Free.” It was a prized possession, among the most useful items she’d ever owned, like the towel that galactic hitchhikers are advised to take along by “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Since she always kept it in the bottom of her day pack, she had forgotten all about it. She handed it to Vroni, who wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl.

Vroni was poor. Her drab, conservative home village in the plains southeast of Regensburg had lost its train station before she was born. Its surroundings were, by Bavarian standards, exceptionally flat. She had migrated at the age of eighteen to their picturesque and desirable university town the way an American runaway might fetch up in an R.V. encampment in the desert. She had studied ethnography, consciously broadening her horizons. Her field studies had taken her to Central Asia.

Julia was better off, a freelance translator of internal communications for suppliers to the automotive industry, who did occasional literary translation projects in her spare time. She had not saved up to come to the Niesen; she had qualified for a literary-translating conference in Thun and, when she realized that the organizers had booked her a double room, had invited Vroni to join her. The closest Julia had ever come to field work in the East was an excursion to Prague, where she’d gotten into a stilted conversation about work with some cleaners.

Their minds were very different. Julia read fiction and talked about the news, while Vroni read classics of societal analysis (a favorite was Marilyn Strathern’s “The Gender of the Gift”) and talked about her own life. Vroni seemed to Julia never to have consumed a mass medium of any kind. She had no internet at home, for the sake of the children. When she needed to look something up, she went to her office.

Julia had longed to be an educated mother like Vroni, but there was never a serviceable father in view, so she had limited herself to being educated, first as an autodidact—via unsystematic reading of primary material, the classic works of fiction and philosophy—and then by moving to Germany, where knowledge could be acquired tuition-free. She began too late. She’d misapprehended the nature of ivory-tower research, choosing secondary sources that had been disregarded in their own fields for decades. She would never be taken seriously as an academic. But she had been cautious around her inadequate boyfriends and had never once had a pregnancy scare, so that was something.

“Pregnancy scare” was a term impossible to connect with Vroni, who had carelessly gotten pregnant at age twenty-two and married the Casanova expert. She easily obtained scholarships for her interesting and useful research. The family received hundreds of euros per child per month from the state, no strings attached, and it was much more than they needed. They shared a small apartment heated with firewood stolen from the municipal forest. When the heap of cash in the cigar box on the kitchen table had attained a value of forty thousand euros, they’d given it to Julia, who had deposited it in her bank account as though it were an interest-free private loan. Then Vroni and the louche aficionado of Enlightenment sexual mores found a large house so historic that the state would pay them to renovate it, and Julia returned the money to them for use as a down payment.

Through three more pregnancies and her husband’s impregnation of three other women with five additional children, Vroni remained happily married, and she was married to him to this day. Of course, people would tell her to leave that libertinage-loving slob, and she’d stop talking to them, regarding them henceforth as ignorant bigots. He might be off getting some random person pregnant after a night out, but meanwhile she was avidly seducing a hot exchange student or banging the next-door neighbor. They were an attentive, caring team, kind to every child that arose. The other moms were nothing special, Vroni said, but it was so much fun, having babies around that weren’t her responsibility, like having grandchildren. Her own children had stopped being pliant angels long ago, but the darling babies kept pouring in, tirelessly fed and diapered by the vain dandy.

Julia’s opinion of Vroni’s husband was checkered, to say the least. She rather hated him and felt sure that he would one day leave Vroni—the only parent involved who had a job—and demand alimony.

Vroni maintained that her form of marriage had been accepted in many times and places, and that her husband was not as unusual as one might think. All the children were brilliant and beautiful, and soon enough they were independent, cooking for themselves and making their own arrangements, although they could not be prevailed upon to clean anything, ever. But they were such good children, peacefully playing amid the disorder while she opened a bottle of wine, rolled cigarettes, and reviewed the events of the day with the willfully unemployed lover of all things Venetian.

How different Vroni would have been as a penniless rebel with brains who was born American, Julia thought. The penniless American rebels she knew were undereducated and desperate, turning to irrational notions after their meagre baccalaureates, and the stress of their lives made them sick, no matter how little they smoked and drank. The Germans were like Vroni, rebelling by failing to finish their job training (in Vroni’s case, a doctorate), so that they had to learn new trades. Vroni had become a packaging designer. Every morning she commuted twenty minutes by train to a cosmetics factory, where she came up with new ways of folding cardboard, but only until noon; the job was part time.

Julia walked with her head high, at a normal pace, confident now that the slope beside her would serve as a safety net like the one that enfolded Vroni—the German welfare state. Vroni pulled the blanket close, trapping her warmth in its one-person free world.

The day grew brighter, and Julia began to take stock of the flower situation, which was hard-core. The pastures were scattered with gentians. Their vivid, indelible blue (a person had to be careful not to sit on them) reminded her of something a famous war reporter she knew had told her—that deep in Afghanistan, guarded by difficult terrain and hostile clans, there are mountains so rich in lapis lazuli that they sparkle blue in sunlight. Walking the rugged, uneven trail, she told Vroni this story. It was one she especially liked because no one she told it to had ever believed it. The faithful consisted only of her and the reporter.

But why wouldn’t it be true? A diamond mine in South Africa a hundred years ago was a bunch of guys finding diamonds like Easter eggs on the ground. The hawksbill sea turtles with their valuable, beautiful shells used to come ashore in crowds of forty thousand. Rivers back then sometimes held more delicious salmon than they held water. Why shouldn’t there be semiprecious mountains hidden in remote and inaccessible tribal lands? Why were people so adamant about the superiority of today’s world? She sketched her views on the subject while Vroni walked ahead.

Vroni agreed that the world was a two-edged sword. She didn’t believe in the blue mountains, either. She showed Julia some anemones that had gone to seed, pointing out that the flower in bloom is just like a pretty poppy, but once the petals fall it becomes an alien-looking gray pompom. This was why sea anemones were called anemones! It made sense! They crouched to admire the mute flowers that had given their name to animals in the ocean. The clouds ascending skyward on waves of thermals suddenly parted like a curtain. A majestic rocky peak appeared, outlined in blazing snow.

They stood to watch. The curtain closed again. Continuing along the ridge, which was no longer crowned by the trail in an unnerving way but rose next to it, they saw that a certain pair of flattish, dry rocks would be good for sitting on. Julia unpacked their picnic, turning around again and again to scan the enormous display of clouds, mountains, wildflowers, and sun. The light of day arrived on the ridge. All was transfigured, silver and gold. Droplets lay on the leaves like jewels. A thousand hues of green quivered in the breeze, the tiny leaves of meadow plants dappling one another with their shade. Vroni rolled a cigarette and, more than half an hour later, rolled a second one, stowing her leavings in an antique portable ashtray made of metal and leather. And so they passed the time while the earth turned and the sun climbed, warming the air.

Once, years earlier, Vroni had related—while painting her high-walled kitchen with the aid of a stepladder on a table—an anecdote so magnificent that Julia still retailed its highlights to other friends, as though summarizing the plot of a movie. In essence, as Julia remembered it, Vroni had been walking decorously, part of a group of ethnographers headed to a remote Kazakh archeological site, when a venomous snake flung itself out of the underbrush and bit her in the shin. Everyone agreed that this was a freakish event and not her fault. At first, her colleagues assumed that she could walk back to town, but soon they were carrying her. When she passed out, they began to run. She awoke in the hospital, near death. The professor who had been leading the excursion sat by her bed, drenched in tears, holding her cold hand. She asked Vroni for contact information for her parents.

“No!” Vroni cried, adrenaline coursing through her. “They’re the last people on earth I want to see!” She had gone to university to get away from their narrow-minded world of religious prejudice, which she regarded as incipiently fascist, like all systems that consign the living to damnation. She indicated that, rather than entertain her professor while she was dying, much less her parents, husband, or children, she would like to be alone with Aslan, a local shepherd, whose voice could be heard clearly through the door. The professor was visibly perturbed. Vroni could read her mind, which was thinking, We’ve been here for all of, what, four days, and already you want to die in the arms of your unethical relationship with the subject of my field work? Vroni traced the end of her serious chance at an academic career to that moment when she hurt the sad professor’s feelings. Her very vitality—surviving the lethal snake bite; having Aslan lock the door behind him while they got it on; refusing the amputation of her leg, which recovered fully—suggested to her colleagues that she might be an indestructible subhuman, or at least sub-academic.

On the mountain, Vroni and Julia told stories about washed-out bridges, snow bridges, snowstorms, rainstorms, walking on highways, hiking at night, man-eating stray dogs in Greece, a dog named Gelert who passed as a saint, and the Irish monk St. Gall, who returned Christianity to Europe from its western fringes, where it had been driven by invading Central Asians, a topic that died on the vine, having been gravely misrecollected by Julia. Vroni was visibly bored. She talked about the resurgence of bride kidnapping after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nowadays the practice took the form of orchestrated rape, she said, but, before seventy years of Communism, it had been a relatively benign tradition. A man who couldn’t afford to buy his girlfriend would steal her, and everyone was happy except her parents, who had fed her for fifteen years for nothing.

The herd of hungry young polled beef cattle that had greeted them through the mist was moving closer, munching audibly amid the din of bells. Vroni suggested that they continue walking along the ridge and take the trail down the mountain, instead of riding the funicular.

Julia had her doubts, partly because she was wearing sneakers, and partly because she had bought them both round-trip funicular tickets. She was not as poor as Vroni, but she was not rich enough to waste expensive tickets.

They agreed to wait and see if some hikers coming the other way might be prepared to report on conditions down below.

When a pair finally arrived, clad in bright rain gear with walking sticks, their boots told the whole story: the mud on the trail was ankle deep and slippery. The men soon moved on toward the restaurant, intent on eating lunch and then putting miles behind them, with the long descent ahead.

Julia and Vroni strolled back along the ridge, through frequent flashes of sunshine. They came around an outcropping to find the cattle herd loudly blocking the trail. Clang, ding, thump, munch, moo, a dense throng of lunks.

“I bet you know how to make them move,” Julia optimistically assured Vroni. There was no question that Vroni, a child of a rural area filled with similar animals, had more expertise in the livestock realm. She dispatched herself to clear a path.

To Julia’s surprise, she walked right up to a brawny steer’s shoulder and attempted to push it off the trail as though it were a pygmy goat. It pushed back with its nose, knocking her off her feet. She landed softly on her rear and elbows and immediately stood up again, laughing. But the beast was half wild. Vroni was too small to play its pushing game. It would win.

Instead the women moved uphill from the blocked trail, sidling along just below the ridgeline, well away from the massive cattle, which they hoped would stay put.

They stood on tiptoe to peer over the top, which was adorned with tufts of grass like a fringe. Just beyond their noses was a sheer drop of thousands of feet. Two shining lakes and three big cities nestled in broad valleys below. They watched as cloud curtains opened and closed.

Julia said, “This is so pretty.” She thought, This is life at its best. To be touched by fear, but not afraid in the least. This is what Americans are looking for when they obsessively watch horror movies and war videos: the sublime! Compulsively walking the valley of the shadow of death, when fear can dwell amid clouds and flowers.

Vroni was racing toward the restaurant like a snow leopard to get them a table before the lunch rush. Julia envied her. She would have felt so much smarter if she’d stayed in America, without highly educated friends who intimidated her. By rights she should have gotten an associate’s degree in hospitality management in Cincinnati, and taken up bloviating about NIMBYs, kinbaku, and “socialism” (the American name for progressive taxation), after meals of CBD gummies that she needed for her pain. But she loved her life. She wondered why she hadn’t shared her insight about the sublime with Vroni. Because it was dumb and naïve? How could feelings be dumb? Where was this sneaking sense of doom and nullity coming from? From the clouds? The cold? The eerie view over the ridge, seeing the land of counterpane through a screen of flowers, inches from death? That had to be it. The fear hormones were still acting on her, but she wasn’t looking at beauty anymore. She was alone on the trail, watching her step, imagining how bored Vroni would have been by her revelation.

She had read somewhere that it’s impossible to feel fear when your hands are holding something warm. Freedom may not be free, but hot chocolate in a vortex of terror is five francs, tops. She bought herself a hot chocolate at the restaurant. Vroni said she didn’t want anything.

“There’s something I want to say,” Vroni said, after they sat down. “I’m sick and tired of you.” She unwrapped the blanket from her shoulders and wadded it up, like worthless trash, to hand it back to Julia.

Julia gulped, coughed, and said, “What?”

“I feel as if I know nothing about you, but you keep wanting to get closer, demanding more. You’re possessive and judgmental, but you act like I’m in charge, like with those cattle just now. Our conversations are so superficial. I want to have real friends. I’ve tried with you. I’m a polite person, so I know I’m surprising you, but I don’t think we should see each other again. I’ve been wanting to say this to you for a long time, almost twenty years. Something about your making me come here makes it easy.” Vroni gestured toward the emptiness beyond the windows. “I wish you all good things, but I don’t want to know what ‘good’ means to you.” She waited for a reaction. Then she took off her cap to comb out her dull, dusty mane with dirty fingers stained brown, killing time with desultory self-care as though unobserved. She tucked her hair up again and took a swig of water from the canteen in her bag.

Julia stared. Had Vroni lost her marbles? Was this what people were asking for when they complained about being ghosted—an explicit jilting, rich in memorable detail? If Vroni’s independent, pragmatic mind differed greatly from her own, as she sincerely believed it did and had always found to be a big plus, it might never be possible for her to comprehend what Vroni had just said. Or anything else, either. The whole world might be functionally a hallucination—that was what cognitive neuroscience said. A hallucination with pointy tentacles.

She held her hot chocolate with both hands and said nothing for a good long while before asking, “Are you going straight home?”

Vroni plunked a five-franc coin on the table and said, “Buy yourself another hot chocolate.”

She clomped away toward the exit, shedding mud as she went.

Julia later saw her napping on a lounger outside, but she didn’t try to wake her. She returned by train to the room in Thun, where there was no trace of her former friend, who hadn’t even packed a change of clothes. Vroni’s toothbrush was a disposable one from the hotel reception. She had vanished, propelled by repressed hatred. Who knew.

But Vroni appears happier than ever now, and when Julia sees her around town she is cheered by the lasting conviction that she has absolutely no idea what is going on in anybody’s little pea brain. She once had a whole theory about Vroni, but that’s over. What was Vroni’s rejection of her all about? Vroni ignores her, and Julia will never know.

Wolfgang thinks that Vroni always had a screw loose. He says he wouldn’t roll down a grassy mountain if you paid him. ♦

Your story “The Welfare State” follows two women who have been friends, living in the same small town in Bavaria, for two decades, as they take a walk along the peak of Mt. Niesen, in the Swiss Alps. The two characters are very different, both in background and in personality. What made this mountain peak the ideal spot for their differences to come to a head?

I should say up front that I don’t write this stuff. It comes to me unbidden, the way every sentence I speak does. Imagine if I had to search for the words among eighty-six billion neurons! I had to do that once when I went into a catatonic fugue state while defending my dissertation to a jury of stern professors, and once when I was on some really bad acid, and, believe me, it’s not how you get a reputation for being articulate. So they (the neurons) got together and decided that high ground in a rich, neutral country is the best place to set a summit meeting. They weren’t the first to come to that conclusion! Moreover—I must thank my friend Ian Christe, the great Swiss American heavy-metal critic, for both these points—Switzerland is so beautiful that there’s a subreddit devoted to exposing it as computer-generated art (“SwitzerlandIsFake”), and yet on every single hiking trail, no matter how harmless it looks on the map, there comes a moment when one wonders whether one is about to die.

Julia is American, more rigid, less carefree and open than Vroni, who is German. This is, in some ways, the inverse of the usual stereotypes. Has your own experience proved those stereotypes wrong?

My favorite stereotype is the one where Germans think Americans are prudish. I’ve lived in Germany since 2000, and I remember the first time I saw “Sex and the City” in the original. It was so gratingly vulgar. In Germany, I’d apparently been watching a bowdlerized edit, halfway to the Saudi version. I’d say that Vroni isn’t open; she’s an educated German with a head full of knowledge, unwilling to repeat herself. Americans like to talk about things they have in common. Given the current political and religious situations in the U.S., they can’t even make small talk with friends anymore—it’s more like micro-talk. Yet they will have the most intense personal conversations with strangers they’re sure they’ll never see again. Julia is not amused that Vroni felt free to marry a philanderer who loves kids, rather than someone hardworking and faithful, but her notions of women’s and children’s needs were formed by her own experiences. The two of them occupy the same world, but they register it on different frequencies. I should point out that Vroni is from Catholic Bavaria, while Julia—like most American Wasps—is psychologically more of a Prussian. Catholics, like Orthodox Jews, believe that God wants your good deeds and the performance of certain rituals and isn’t that interested in what goes on in your head. Martin Luther’s big breakthrough was sola fide, the origin of today’s dainty capitalist egos.

The story implies that Vroni’s carefree existence is possible because she lives in a “welfare state,” where the government supports child care, education, housing, and so on, and thus there is less pressure to earn and climb in a career, and children can be somewhat left to raise themselves. Is that your take on life in Germany, too?

Germany is a more patriarchal, more ageist, less free country than the U.S., but a little constitutional commitment to human dignity goes a long way. Unlimited education for all who qualify is crucial to maintaining the level of public discourse, as well as the quality of public services. By “less free” I mean, for instance, that federal law here mandates rent stabilization and even something resembling unionization. It’s hard to evict or fire anyone, and wages in fields with vulnerable workers are regulated (along with payments to veterinarians, estate lawyers, and other potential extortionists). The lack of an open market gives workers leverage, and women often use it to reduce their hours in harmony with the short school days here, rather than to raise their income. Day care is sparse, because of stringent licensing requirements. But now I’m reminding myself of a German friend who warned an American friend’s trans child against moving here because of Germany’s “creeping fascism.” If it’s creeping here, what’s it doing over there—galloping? Poor people struggle in Germany, but from a relatively comfy platform, child care aside.

I don’t want to give away the last scene of the story for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, so I’ll just say that it comes as a completely unexpected shock to Julia. Why do you think Julia fails to read the room, so to speak, and doesn’t realize that her view of things isn’t shared by those around her?

She’s always known that there’s a disconnect between her and Vroni, but that’s common enough in friendships, unless you socialize exclusively with like-minded people from your own milieu. The paradox is that, when you’re not just nodding and smiling about unfamiliar emotions but truly trying to comprehend them, you’re probably forcing square pegs into round holes. If Vroni published a novel, of course, Julia would be off the hook. Any reader can buy access to literary writers’ minds for the price of a library card and then give them one-star reviews for not being relatable. But Vroni’s just trying to live her life. Because Julia cares about her enough to identify with her, she’s torn between expressing her concerns and simply being a helpful friend.

Should we take it as both literal and metaphorical that, on the mountaintop, Julia feels as if she were about to fall into an abyss while Vroni bounds around like a chamois, fully convinced of her own safety?

Right now all my American pals who aren’t retirement age are afraid of losing their jobs. They work in fields that are downsizing, like journalism, social work, and global-health advocacy. Many own guns, which they keep loaded and within reach when I’m sleeping in their homes, to my extremely amazed trepidation. Julia’s first instinct is to fear the unknown, because life in America can be over so fast, both figuratively and literally. One little tax-evasion case goes against you, one mug shot for an alleged misdemeanor, and you’re unemployable, at least if you have an unusual name like mine. In Germany, you can discreetly serve time for murder—generally fifteen years, with time off for good behavior—which cuts down on your motivation to take out as many people as possible in one fell swoop, before turning the gun on yourself. I say that Julia consumes news stories—which contributes to her anxiety—and happy-go-lucky Vroni doesn’t, but the unpredictability in the U.S. is getting close enough to touch. My friends in Philly had a neighbor shot to death by a fourteen-year-old in front of their house, followed by a mass shoot-out between two teen cliques at the local dog run, and the weirdest thing happened when I was in Virginia in October: I was at an old friend’s house way out in the woods, and someone came during the night and stole about fifty ripe tomatoes out of the garden. We were planning to can them the next day. I guess Americans are back to doing food heists like hobos.

Tell me about the genesis of this story. Several months ago, I asked if you were writing short fiction, and very quickly there was a draft of a story in my inbox. Did these characters already exist in your mind? Had you been planning to write this narrative?

In all my gallivanting around Germany since 1983, I’ve only ever met one sex worker, a charming dyslexic who had moved here from the Balkans, with her working-class parents, at sixteen. In the years after she flunked out of school, prostitution was still nominally criminalized—the market hadn’t yet been flooded with teen-agers on work visas in huge brothels—and she could make a living by meeting select clients in the afternoons. She said it compared favorably with her other options as an illiterate young woman, and I believe her. She wasn’t a member of my social circle; I met her at a Prostitution Working Group meeting of the Baden-Württemberg Green Party. In the U.S. context, I can’t talk or write about the backgrounds of the sex workers I’ve known without outing friends and colleagues. And far be it from me to imply that it’s a less-than-ideal side gig. American sex workers are an even scarier organized affinity group than translators. (I mean scary in the social-media sense—I’m not saying that their wrath is physically hazardous.) One does not disparage their choices, or suggest that prostitution is perhaps not the oldest profession. (Historically, it has become common in times and places with dramatic wealth gaps and relevant limits on enslavement.) So there I was, intent on cranking out a short story overnight, preferably on an urgent topic that had been conveniently knocking around in my brain for eons, but without mentioning the topic itself, because who needs that can of worms. I asked the neurons, “What might a wild woman free from urgent economic pressures do with her life, other than fail to annoy me with stock rationalizations about how men traditionally package emotional labor as cash, and how dates with finance bros in New York are the same routine whether or not you’re getting a thousand bucks and a late checkout with room service?”

Your most recent novel, “Sister Europe,” was published earlier this year. It’s set in Berlin and takes place entirely in one night in the lives of its characters. Which do you prefer writing—novels or stories? Which do you prefer reading?

I’ve written six novels since I started publishing, and three stories. I’d say the evidence speaks for itself. There are a couple of canonic stories that my B.F.F.s and I refer to at regular intervals: “Five Letters from an Eastern Empire,” by Alasdair Gray, and “The Winter Journey,” by Georges Perec. I admit I’ve never gotten through an Alasdair Gray novel. When people can’t really write but have good ideas, I prefer that they keep it short. But my favorite authors write so well and copiously that I can happily keep going for eight hundred pages. I’m not counting Robert Walser as a short-story writer. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of his miniatures, but, as he himself said, they’re all vignettes from one big “Ich-Buch”—like Dr. Seuss’s “My Book About Me by ME Myself,” only longer. ♦

During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, “went off his rocker,” as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, “The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.”

Liebling, who joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935, ten years after its founding, quickly made a reputation as a humorous and versatile observer of the human condition. “I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter,” he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, “I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better.” Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: “If there is to be a world cataclysm, it will probably be set off by skim milk, Melba toast, and mineral oil on the salad.”

Liebling took over The Wayward Press, a column in the magazine, in which he prosecuted the sins and miscues of the Fourth Estate, which he labelled “the weak slat under the bed of democracy.” Although he was terribly nearsighted, out of shape, and plagued by gout (his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell once observed him using a strip of bacon as a bookmark), his vigorous coverage of D Day and the liberation of Paris led the French government to award him the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Untidy in his personal life, he was on his third wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, when he died, at the age of fifty-nine.

Liebling’s foremost talent was bringing memorable characters roaring to life, so it’s not surprising that he fell in love with Earl Long. The New Yorker wisely allocated three issues to Liebling’s profile of Long, titled “The Great State”; the articles were later collected in a book with a superior title, “The Earl of Louisiana.”

Like other reporters who joined in the merriment, Liebling came to Louisiana to scoff at Long. “I had left New York thinking of him as a Peckerwood Caligula,” he confessed. But, when he watched news coverage of the legislative session, he listened closely to what the ranting governor was saying to the recalcitrant legislators. Long was attacking a law, passed around the time of Reconstruction, that allowed election registrars to disqualify voters on “educational” grounds, a measure designed to push Black people off the voter rolls. “It took me a minute or two to realize that the old ‘demagogue’ was actually making a civil-rights speech,” Liebling wrote. He began to recognize Long as something more important than another Southern political buffoon. Long was a skillful progressive politician operating in a conservative, racist environment. For all the droll humor in Liebling’s coverage, that insight is what made his report a classic.

Liebling’s articles about Long caught my eye when they were published, in the spring of 1960. They influenced my decision to attend Tulane University, in New Orleans, the city that Liebling had painted so vibrantly; they also pointed me toward journalism, and they fixed in my mind The New Yorker as my ideal professional destination. For my generation, Liebling still loomed as a model of incisive journalism with a personal voice. He was scholarly and highly literate while also at home with hat-check girls and the bookies at the racetrack. He barbecued the reactionary intellectuals of his era, but portrayed ordinary people with warmth. Most of them, that is. Liebling displayed a New York City chauvinism by mercilessly skewering Chicago, the “second city.” In the evening, when the commuters fled, Chicago was a “vast, anonymous pulp,” he wrote, “plopped down by the lakeside like a piece of waterlogged fruit. Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses.”

I have in my office a poster on which Liebling’s portrait is accompanied by his cautionary warning: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” ♦

The Great State—I